New laptop - extremely slow

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RisseN

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Hi All,

My wife was given a brand new laptop from work this week and something seems to be very wrong with it. It runs ok for a while but as soon as she's worked on it for a while (ie: opened a few programs, worked with a few images etc), it slows down to a halt. It gets so slow that it hangs and becomes unusable.

She only uses it for about 20minutes, during which time she works on power point, word, and opening images to edit and add to powerpoint. It then slows to the point that openeing an image takes +- 1 minute. After a while it hangs completely and needs to be restarted.

The only thing that I can think of is that it may have something to do with all her old files from her old laptop being copied to her new laptop by her IT department. From what I can tell they make an exact copy of her old laptop and copy everything over to her new laptop (I presume using some sort of image). I've had a look on the processes/services running and there is something called vpc.exe (virtual pc?) running. Could that maybe be causing the issues?

Her laptop is a Dell latitude Intel I5 with 4gigs Ram running windows 7 and is brand new. There's no way a laptop like that should slow down and become unusable after 20minutes of use.

Below are some images of all her processes/services taken directly after booting the machine. Before anything has been started. 82 processes running and 58% memory used.

image-47D0_4F9E6563.jpg

image-459B_4F9E6563.jpg

image-7519_4F9E6563.jpg

image-04C6_4F9E6563.jpg

image-3A75_4F9E6563.jpg

image-4865_4F9E6650.jpg


Please can someone offer some advice on what might be happening. Could it be to do with that vpc.exe? Could it be something to do with the way they copied all her files over from her old laptop (using some sort of image?). Her old laptop was extremely slow by the way. She will be taking the laptop to her IT dept, but they are generally useless so we're not hopeful of them fixing it.

thanks.
 
Click the 'Resource Monitor' button, and then select the 'Memory' tab to see exactly what is using all the RAM.
 
If the recovery/restore partition is still on the laptop I would backup all the data, email & bookmarks, format & reinstall from the recovery partition.
 
Look at the task manager when the laptop is slow for anything consuming large amounts of memory or anything running at 100% CPU

This will most likely be the culprit causing the slow down.

Click the button Show Processes From All Users to see everything that is running not just applications started under your wife's account.

Don't take ponder's advice as this can result in a written warning depending on the company's policies, it is not a user's place to reload any PC or Laptop connected to a corporate network.
 
Run the laptop in safe mode and see if the speed slows down as you say, possible that some driver leaking memory, msibehaving, or just not working properly.

Alternative you can run msconfig and choose debugging mode.


Sent from South Africas most popular smartphone BlackBerry
 
In Task manager, go to View --> Select Columns, and add CPU Time to the list.

This will give you a better idea of what exactly is eating CPU power, as just the percentage figure can be misleading.
 
Thanks for all the replies. When my wife gets home later ill try all the suggestions posted and get back to you on what I find.
 
Hey Hey

Another thing you could try... is create another user profile and login with this... do some Powerpoint and Office stuff and see if it does the same thing. I have had machines with weird stuff happening in a user's profile only... and not in a new, clean one.

Control Panel Category View
Start >> Control Panel >> User Accounts and Family Safety >> Add or Remove user Accounts >> Create a new account

Control Panel Icon View
Start >> Control Panel >> User Accounts >> Manage another account >> Create a new account
 
I noticed that in the Task Manager processes screenshot, you never clicked the "Show processes from all users" button.

Task Manager is terrible for finding services that hoggs the CPU. Rather use SysInternal's Process Explorer for that.
With Process Explorer I would recommend that you enable the I/O and CPU History/Graph columns.

If svchost.exe is the CPU hogg, then hover your mouse over it to get the tip-tool-text, in which case it will display all the services running under that instance of svchost.exe.
 
If it's only slow at home then it's probably that the IP settings are set up for the office.

Another cause would be that network drives are mapped.

As kilo suggested set up a home user profile and give that profile access toher documents on her office profile
 
Its probably still busy indexing the old files copied over. Just let it sit somewhere & run for a couple of hours. Mem usage does seem high though.

Click on button as pada said & sort by mem usage column.
 
When I bought my Dell XPS L502X notebook, it was also miserably slow (see my specs on me signature). It had all these funny dell softwares you do not need (dell stage, antivirus, etc). I re-installed windows and that solved my problem.
 
Ok, I might be completely wrong, but I think what could have happened is that they just made a Norton Ghost image restore on the new laptop.

So the motherboard and most other drivers are completely wrong, or they slapped the image on the new laptop and then installed all the drivers over the wrong ones.

It's a big ol' mess, I would first install Windows properly, then reinstall the apps, copy her laptop's files to the network and copy it back to the notebook once it's running properly.
 
kingrob said:
Ok, I might be completely wrong, but I think what could have happened is that they just made a Norton Ghost image restore on the new laptop.

So the motherboard and most other drivers are completely wrong, or they slapped the image on the new laptop and then installed all the drivers over the wrong ones.

It's a big ol' mess, I would first install Windows properly, then reinstall the apps, copy her laptop's files to the network and copy it back to the notebook once it's running properly.
Click to expand...

Sysprep/DISM anyone?

Once again, suggesting that someone reloads a laptop that belongs to a company without permission is a really really bad idea
 
Why is this your problem , your wife's work has an IT department , let her logg a problem or fault with them and they will have to sort it out.

You cant just reinstall a laptop at home that belongs to a corparation.
 
Thanks for all the replies.

As some of you have mentioned, there's obviously not much I can do about it because it's a work laptop. I just wanted to get a few possibilities so my wife could go to work armed with a bit of knowledge. Their IT department are absolutely useless (as is clear yet again by how they've set this laptop up). Their usual response (from experience) is: Eish, there is nothing wrong with it, eish.

thanks again.
 
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